"The experience of being forced to leave one's homeland, of being pursued, uprooted and exiled, fractures one's existential sense of continuity. And this is why the problemat of identity for the uprooted (the forcibly uprooted) is often linked to the dream and promise of a return." This quotation from John Berger resonates throughout this edition of M P T dedicated to Palestine. Here is Mahmoud Darwish on the loss of his childhood village: "I wasn't able to memorise the words and protect the place / from being transferred to a strange name fenced in / with eucalyptus trees. While the posters told us: / 'You were never here'." The book features brief histories, letters, memoirs, short polemics and a varied gathering of Israeli and Palestinian poets. But it's the two long pieces by Darwish that dominate , especially "Mural". A stunning duel with death, fierce, moving and immaculately paced, it is a defiant hymn to loss, a brilliant outcry at having little but language to uphold a sense of continuity: "We were good and pious without Christ's teachings / and stronger than grass at summer's end / You are my truth and I your question / We have inherited nothing but our names."